Man of Mystery

Why do people love Stieg Larsson’s novels?

In part because Larsson was not alive when the books were published, the trilogy has been surrounded by a number of controversies.

Illustration by SEAN MCCABE; PHOTOGRAPH by JAN COLLSIOO / AP PHOTO

Having got American readers to buy more than fourteen million copies, collectively, of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy books—“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2008, American edition), “The Girl Who Played with Fire” (2009), and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” (2010)—the management at Knopf has decided that it would like them to buy some more. So the company has issued a boxed set: the three crime novels, plus a new book, “On Stieg Larsson,” containing background materials on the late Swedish writer. If you have been in a coma, say, for the past two years, and have not read the Millennium trilogy, about a crusading journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, and a computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander, battling right-wing forces in Sweden, the set, at ninety-nine dollars, is not a bad bargain. But if you decided to pass on the novels your resolve should not be shaken by this offer. As for “On Stieg Larsson,” don’t worry. It is a small thing—eighty-five pages—and nothing in it solves the central mystery of the Millennium trilogy: why it is so popular.

Larsson, who was born in a village in the north of Sweden in 1954, was an ardent leftist all his life. In the nineteen-eighties, because of immigration, Sweden, like other European countries, saw a sharp increase in racism. Suddenly, there were neo-Nazis and Aryan leagues, and the people involved were no longer crazed souls operating mimeograph machines in basements but smooth characters, in suits, running for public office. In 1995, Larsson and some friends in Stockholm founded a quarterly magazine, Expo, with the declared mission of safeguarding “democracy and freedom of speech by . . . documenting extremist and racist groups in society.” Expo was undisguisedly the model for Millennium, the journal that is Blomkvist’s home base in the trilogy.

Larsson’s anti-authoritarian writings won him and Expo many enemies. The printers and distributors of the magazine had their windows smashed. Larsson received death threats. He took precautions. He allowed no photographs. In restaurants, he and his companion, Eva Gabrielsson, sat so that he could watch one exit, she the other.

Despite all this, Larsson is said to have been a happy man, who lived the life he wanted. He smoked three packs a day, subsisted on hamburgers, and often worked around the clock. He consumed popular novels, especially crime fiction, by the cartload. And then, in 2001, in a move that no one has been able to explain satisfactorily—and about which, for a long time, he told almost no one—he began writing crime fiction. Later, he said that he did it for fun. Or he said that it was for money—that the books were going to be his “retirement fund.” He wrote fast, easily, and late at night. By 2003, he had the trilogy’s first volume, which, in English, is called “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” This is a rather conventional detective novel, except that the villains are Nazis and neo-Nazis, and the crimes are unusually grisly: incestuous rape (homo and hetero), plus murders of the most appalling sort. One victim is gagged with a sanitary napkin and stoned to death. Another is tied up and placed with her face in a bed of dying embers.

Larsson submitted the manuscript to Piratförlag, a publishing house with a strong line of crime novels. The editors there never opened the package. (They did not read manuscripts from first-time authors.) Today, one almost pities them. The publisher that accepted the Millennium trilogy—Norstedts Förlag, the second firm Larsson contacted—has sold three and a half million copies of the books.

The editing went slowly, because Larsson was always overscheduled. “On Stieg Larsson” contains a series of e-mail exchanges between him and his Norstedts editor, Eva Gedin. In them we find Gedin asking Larsson politely, but with increasing emphasis, to make room in his schedule to meet with her and hear her editorial suggestions. He responds blithely that he will do so, eventually. One afternoon, seven months after the contract was signed, he went to work at Expo, found that the elevator was broken, climbed seven flights of stairs, had a heart attack, and died. He was fifty.

In part because Larsson was not alive when the books were published, the Millennium trilogy has been surrounded by a number of controversies, the juiciest being the question of who should be receiving the fortune the books have earned. The most deserving beneficiary, as many people saw it, was Eva Gabrielsson, who was not only Larsson’s companion for three decades but who also, at various times, supported him, not to speak of putting up with the fact that he normally came home around midnight. The two of them never married, however. Larsson—and, later, Gabrielsson—said that this was a way of protecting her; she would not run his risks. Years earlier, Larsson had written a will leaving his entire estate to the Communist Workers’ Party of his home town, but the will was not witnessed and therefore was not valid. When Swedes die intestate, everything is awarded to their kin—a strange law in a country where unregistered unions are almost the rule. In any case, Larsson’s money has gone to the two surviving members of his immediate family, his father and his brother.

These two men were not unaware of the awkwardness of their position. They gave Gabrielsson Larsson’s half of the apartment that she shared with him. They also proposed to pay her $2.7 million, by way of a settlement. She refused this offer, at which point the dealings between the two parties grew nasty. Gabrielsson told the press that Larsson had been alienated from his father and brother. They, in turn, suggested that Gabrielsson was psychologically disturbed. The story became even more exciting when the news got out that Gabrielsson had Larsson’s laptop, which, according to several sources (including her), contained more than half of a fourth novel, plus notes for the remainder—in other words, enough material so that someone else could finish it and it could still be called a Stieg Larsson novel. (Some of Larsson’s associates say that he had plans for ten novels, and had started the fifth as well as the fourth.) Does Gabrielsson really have the laptop? At one point, she told the press that she had given it to Expo. Elsewhere, she has said, “No comment.” Reportedly, we will find out the answer when Gabrielsson’s memoir is published, next year. Meanwhile, a lot of people think that she has been terribly wronged. If you call up www.supporteva.com, you can make a contribution to her upkeep.

Another question that has been raised about the trilogy is: Who wrote it? A co-worker of Larsson’s at Expo, Kurdo Baksi, suggested in a recent memoir, “Stieg Larsson: Our Days in Stockholm,” that Larsson did not have a talent for writing. Another colleague has come right out and said that someone else must have authored or at least heavily edited the books. The person most often pointed to is Gabrielsson, who is reputed to have good literary skills. (She is an architect and writer.) Asked about her contribution to the trilogy, Gabrielsson has been as elusive as she was about the laptop. In an interview with Swedish National Television, she denied having given any direct assistance. Then, repeatedly, she spoke of the books’ author as “we.”

If Gabrielsson didn’t edit the trilogy, did anyone else—for example, its editors? The e-mails printed in “On Stieg Larsson” suggest that Eva Gedin, of Norstedts, was not often successful in getting Larsson to meet with her. Furthermore, they had only seven months together. When I asked Gedin whether, as a result, the books received little editing, she firmly denied this. With the second and third books, she said, she suggested some revisions, and Larsson indicated his approval. As for the first, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” she told me that it was thoroughly edited, and that big changes were made, before he died. She recalled, for example, that the manuscript had opened with an extensive description of a flower, which, as she put it, was “a little bit boring.” She got Larsson to let her take that out. Still, Norstedts may have been reluctant to make extensive changes that the author had not survived to oversee.

As for the English edition, it was apparently not subject to any such scruples. The translation was done at top speed (because Norstedts needed to show it to a film company), and then it was heavily revised by its editor, Christopher MacLehose, of Quercus Press, in London. Gabrielsson registered bitter complaints about the changes. So did the translator, Steven Murray. He actually took his name off the novels; he is credited under a pseudonym, Reg Keeland. MacLehose stands by his work. “I did edit the translation, yes,” he wrote to me, “but it isn’t a particularly interesting fact or story and it has earned me enough abuse already from the translator and from the author’s former partner. Perhaps [it is] sufficient to say that seven or eight houses in England turned it down in its original form”—Murray’s English translation—“and seven or eight in America. In its edited form, as many Americans bid for it.”

However much the book was revised, it should have been revised more. The opening may have been reworked, as Gedin says, but it still features an episode—somebody telling somebody else at length (twelve pages!) about a series of financial crimes peripheral to the main plot—that, by wide consensus, is staggeringly boring. (And, pace Gedin, it is preceded by a substantial description of a flower.) Elsewhere, there are blatant violations of logic and consistency. Loose ends dangle. There are vast dumps of unnecessary detail. When Lisbeth goes to IKEA, we get a list of every single thing she buys. (“Two Karlanda sofas with sand-colored upholstery, five Poäng armchairs, two round side tables of clear-lacquered birch, a Svansbo coffee table, and several Lack occasional tables,” and that’s just for the living room.) The jokes aren’t funny. The dialogue could not be worse. The phrasing and the vocabulary are consistently banal. (Here is Lisbeth, about to be raped: “Shit, she thought when he ripped off her T-shirt. She realized with terrifying clarity that she was out of her depth.”) I am basing these judgments on the English edition, but, if this text was the product of extensive editing, what must the unedited version have looked like? Maybe somebody will franchise this popular series—hire other writers to produce further volumes. This is not a bad idea. We’re not looking at Tolstoy here. The loss of Larsson’s style would not be a sacrifice.

The most crippling weakness of the trilogy, however, is its hero. Mikael Blomkvist is so anti-masculinist that, in a narrative where people are brandishing chainsaws, he can take no forceful action. That goes for his sex life, too, which features heavily in the plot. Mikael is irresistible to women, we are told, yet he never makes the first move. Not that Larsson’s women have a problem with this. “Are you going to come quietly or do I have to handcuff you?” one says. Lisbeth is more direct. She just walks into his bedroom in the middle of the night and plops down on him. He apparently gives all his bedmates a good time, but one wonders whether he has a good time. A girlfriend says to him that he seems to get a fair amount of action. “Yes, unfortunately,” he answers. Again and again, he tries to maneuver his relations with Lisbeth out of sex and into friendship. “Lisbeth, can you define the word friendship for me?” he asks. She is not sure how to answer. He tells her, avuncularly (he’s almost twenty years older than she), that friendship is built on respect and trust. Ugh!

In 2009, three Swedish movies were made of the novels, with Niels Arden Oplev directing “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (the best one) and Daniel Alfredson the final two. These films were huge hits, and they certainly bumped up the sales of the books. Like many mediocre novels, the trilogy is far better on the screen than on the page. The screenwriters, trying to bring their stories down to two hours, got rid of a lot of the clutter and scrubbed off the sugar coating that Larsson put on the relationship between Mikael and Lisbeth. Finally, the movies give us lovely things to see—fog-bound islands, dewy leaves. Sony is now producing an American movie trilogy, with Daniel Craig as Mikael. After a loud fuss in the press, the role of Lisbeth was given to Rooney Mara, who had a small part in “The Social Network.” (She was the girlfriend who dumped Mark Zuckerberg in the opening scene.) She will have big boots to fill. Nothing in the three Swedish films is better than Noomi Rapace, the actress who plays Lisbeth. In most of the first movie, to show us how surly and unapproachable Lisbeth is, Rapace wears her punk hairdo so that it covers her left eye. In the third movie, we get to see both her eyes, but, because she is in the hospital, recovering from dire wounds, and then on trial (she’s been framed by the villains), she barely speaks. Yet whether she has one eye or two eyes, she communicates something like a five-act tragedy.

It is clear what people like in these movies, but what accounts for the success of the novels, despite their almost comical faults? Larsson may have had a weakness for extraneous detail, but at the same time, paradoxically, he is a very good storyteller. (Mario Vargas Llosa, in an article on the trilogy, compared Larsson to Dumas père.) As for cheap thrills, there’s dirt aplenty and considerable mayhem.

Early in the trilogy, we find out that when Lisbeth was a child her mother was regularly beaten senseless by her mate, Alexander Zalachenko, a Russian spy who had defected to Sweden, where a secret branch of the security police put him on the payroll, thinking that he could tell them useful secrets. Lisbeth told the police about Zalachenko’s assaults on her mother, only to be put away for two years in a state psychiatric hospital. This is the main source of what, in the novel’s present, is Lisbeth’s utter distrust of any government institution, down to the local police. At the end of “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” she has a showdown with Zalachenko. This is a brilliantly orchestrated scene, if you can stand it. Zalachenko shoots Lisbeth in the head. (She runs her fingers over her skull. She finds the hole, feels her wet brain.) Zalachenko and his sidekick, Ronald Niedermann, bury her hastily, failing to notice—they’re in a dark wood—that she is still alive. Once they’re gone, she digs herself out, returns to Zalachenko’s hideout, and sinks an axe in his face.

Near the end of the last book, Niedermann holes up in a brickworks that Zalachenko once owned. When he arrives, he finds two Russian girls, a brunette and a blonde, who have been deposited there by sex traffickers. They are afraid to go outside, and are starving. Niedermann brings them some soup. Then he grabs the brunette and breaks her neck with a single twist. The other watches, and puts up no resistance when it is her turn. You don’t forget such episodes—the truly innocent at the mercy of the truly evil—and they lead directly into the absolutist morals of Larsson’s books, which may also be a powerful selling point. Lisbeth believes that people are responsible for what they do, no matter what was done to them, and plenty was done to her. The trilogy is, to some extent, a revenge story—a popular genre. (Think of “Death Wish” or “True Grit.”) Lisbeth not only cleaves Zalachenko’s skull; she beats up two large bikers simultaneously and, with a Taser, delivers fifty thousand volts to Niedermann’s crotch. The woman warrior has become a beloved feature of the movies, from Nikita to Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft, and beyond. It is also, reportedly, a sexual fantasy popular with men—something else that may have helped to sell the books.

According to certain researchers, another sexual fantasy common among men is rape. Larsson’s campaign against the abuse of power eventually became focussed on one victimized group: women. A friend of Larsson’s tells the story that, at the age of fifteen, Larsson watched as several boys he knew gang-raped a girl. Later, ashamed, he telephoned the girl and asked her to forgive him. She refused. He is said never to have forgotten this episode. In these three violent novels, no species of assault is more highly featured than the rape of women by men. Furthermore, you can’t go twelve pages without being almost screamed at on the subject of feminism. Larsson’s original title for his trilogy was “Men Who Hate Women.” (This remained the title of the first book in the Swedish edition. Gedin says that he absolutely insisted.) All the sections of the first book are prefaced with statistics on crimes against women. The epigraphs in the third book all have to do with female warriors—the Amazons, and so on.

Yet some critics have accused Larsson of having his feminism and eating it, too. They say that, under cover of condemning violence against women, he has supplied, for the reader’s enjoyment, quite a few riveting scenes of violence against women. There are indeed many such scenes, the most vile being the sex murders in the first book. It should be noted, however, that we never see those crimes. They are in the past—they are told to Mikael and Lisbeth, and hence to us. Other crimes against women get curiously brief coverage. Niedermann’s murder of the two Russian girls takes only four lines.

In terms of the plot, the most important crime in the novel’s present time is the rape of Lisbeth by her state-appointed guardian, Nils Bjurman, but, while we’re told that her clothes are torn off and that something is then rammed up her anus, we don’t hear much more. The episode occupies only one page. By contrast, when Lisbeth returns to Bjurman’s apartment to rape him, in the same way, this is given more than six pages, and the assault acquires significant embellishment. On Bjurman’s torso, from his nipples to just above his crotch, Lisbeth tattoos, in big letters, “I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST.” Some of the people who accuse Larsson of double-dealing may be thinking more of the film “Dragon Tattoo,” where the two scenes are more equal in length, and where everything is more horrible just by virtue of being there, on the screen, for us to look at.

Another consideration that would seem to deflect charges of misogyny is simply the character of Lisbeth. She is a complicated person, alienating and poignant at the same time. Many critics have stressed her apparent coldness. In the scene of her revenge against Bjurman, her face never betrays hatred or fear. When the rape is over, she sits in a chair, smokes a cigarette, and stubs it out on his rug. (He is tied up.) Accordingly, some writers have called her a sociopath. Larsson, too, said that once, but elsewhere he described her as a grownup version of Pippi Longstocking, the badly behaved and happy nine-year-old heroine of a series of books, by Astrid Lindgren, beloved of Swedish children. Pippi, Lindgren wrote unsentimentally, “had no mother and no father, and that was of course very nice because there was no one to tell her to go to bed.” Lisbeth wears leather and studs. She has a ring implanted in her left labium. She doesn’t particularly like to be around people. But she is not a sociopath. The primary diagnostic feature of sociopathy is callousness—lack of feeling—toward others. Lisbeth falls in love with Mikael. She brings gifts—cake and perfume—to her mother, who is in a home for the mentally impaired. (Zalachenko’s beatings finally caused brain damage.) She operates outside society but not outside morality. She is an outlaw, or a sprite—a punk fairy.

A final drawing card of the trilogy may be its up-to-dateness, particularly of the technological variety. Other mystery writers—Patricia Cornwell, Henning Mankell—have introduced computers into their arsenal, but no one I know of uses computers as extensively as Larsson to build plot and character. Lisbeth and Mikael find each other online, solve crimes online, acquire their glamour online. (Lisbeth has an “Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz . . . with a PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive.”) Lisbeth’s only friends are fellow-hackers. Her colleague Trinity has infiltrated the computers of the BBC and Scotland Yard: “He even managed—for a short time—to take command of a nuclear submarine on patrol in the North Sea.” One of the sweetest moments in the whole trilogy comes via an electronic device. Mikael has been separated from Lisbeth for almost the entire length of “The Girl Who Played with Fire.” Finally, he breaks into her apartment, looking for evidence that might help her (the police are after her). His entry activates the apartment’s security system. Lisbeth, driving up a country road, is alerted by her cell phone. The system is wired so that after thirty seconds a paint bomb explodes on any intruder. There are six seconds left. Mikael, guessing the machine’s code, turns the system off. Lisbeth taps into her security camera and sees who is standing in her foyer. She smiles—a rare event. She knows now that Mikael is still on her side.

Related to the trilogy’s cutting-edge quality is a revised view of Sweden. After the establishment of the Social Democratic government, in 1932, Sweden seemed, to many people—the Swedes, in particular—a kind of socialist utopia: maternity leaves, free love. (Ingmar Bergman’s movies might appear to contradict such a view, but they are really about humankind, not about his homeland.) The writer John-Henri Holmberg, in an essay on his friend Larsson, lists what he believes are the fundamental tenets of his countrymen’s vision of their society, and, in each case, Larsson’s critique of them. Swedes think that their country is uniquely egalitarian (Larsson presents considerable differences between rich and poor), that Sweden is politically neutral (Larsson shows a burgeoning right), that the Swedish health-care system is the best in the world (Lisbeth is imprisoned in a state hospital), etc. Above all, the Swedes believe that their government is benign, and working for their benefit, whereas, in Holmberg’s words, Larsson shows the Swedish state as “an instrument of violence, wielded against individuals who threaten the privileges and power of those who have managed to gain control of it.” Larsson even denied Sweden’s fabled beauty. However pretty the countryside, his Stockholm has tattoo parlors, S & M clubs, McDonald’s. As Charles McGrath wrote, in the Times, Larsson’s Sweden is “a country . . . a lot like our own.”

The critique is not new. For decades, Sweden’s writers have been portraying the supposed welfare administered by the Swedish welfare state as an empty promise. (And that welfare state may soon be disabled by the recently elected conservative government.) But Holmberg claims that Larsson’s critique is more piercing, especially as it is embodied in Lisbeth. She is an anarchist. (She would surely enjoy the recent activities of WikiLeaks, whose files are stored on servers in Stockholm.) “She is . . . the nightmare of all doctrines, all consensus thinkers, all moralists and all politicians,” Holmberg writes. Larsson doesn’t fully endorse her view, or maybe he felt that it wouldn’t have been good for sales. The trilogy ends with a gesture of trust in the government. The police are called—and by Lisbeth! But only after she’s done the real work. ♦

Joan Acocella has written for The New Yorker, mostly on books and dance, since 1992, and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998. She is the author of, most recently, “Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints.”